Page:Harold Macgrath--The girl in his house.djvu/26

 shoes, loaded his automatic, and set forth upon an adventure which was destined to renew his interest in civilization.

It was October. An east wind was blowing heartily and the old familiar tang of the sea was in the air. There was something in it that stirred in Armitage's mind fragmentary pictures from the seven seas, the sandy forelands, the bending cocoanut palms, the gay parrakeets in the clove-trees. The East was calling; and shortly he knew he would be answering it again. For the present, however, his destination was the brownstone house in Seventy-second Street, once ordinary enough, but now endued with a genuine mystery. The house was one of six in a compact row, a survival of the bald, ugly architecture of the seventies.

Upon finding himself in front of this house, Armitage knocked his pipe against the heel of his shoe. "I'm a reasonable man," he mused aloud—a habit he had acquired in the somber solitudes where the homely sound of one's voice is often a buckler against the unknown terrors of the night. "But who the dickens is this man Athelstone?"